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In it, Zuppero confirms everything – bad, weird, insane, amusing or simply astonishing – you might have always suspected about US government crazy weapons and the world of aerospace.

“Tony Zuppero, one of [a few] would-be nuclear rocketeers, tells those stories as he recalls them, with sometimes alarming candor, humor, and disappointment,” opined Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists after linking to the memoir on his secrecy blog.

Zuppero’s dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson’s well-traveled crackpot ideas – that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

“I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship],” he writes. “It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew… The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk.”

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream’s propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there’s no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

To continue his work on the Orion rocket, Zuppero needs it justified by attachment to weapons analyses. A boss first asks if it’s possible to tow an unshielded nuclear reactor behind an airplane so it spews radioactivity over the Soviet Union or Vietnam. The scientist’s mind freezes and he’s asked to analyze a different project.

Would it be possible to blow up the entire Soviet Union with a launch-to-arrival time of two minutes, so there could be no possibility of retaliation on warning?

This would be 5000 megatons or more, something the weapons shops of the United States could actually build, even though it would be monstrously large.

The technical dilemma was how to get it there fast. Using even more atomic bombs.

The reader immediately sees where this is going. Impractical.

Zuppero is blunt, often humorously so, immediately describing one of his bosses as a Nazi. The scientist is so frank because he is an “Aspie”, he explains – “Autistic, Like Mongoloids and Other Weird People” according to one subchapter. Likening himself to Mr Spock, he concedes that he sometimes says things which are inappropriate.

In the context of the book, it is a bit of an understatement.

After this preamble, Zuppero is “fired” into a job on spy satellites, one meaningless to his undying goal, to design a rocket which can get out into the solar system.

To do this, Zuppero needs fuel and gas stations in space, and the answer to that is water. With a nuclear-heated steam rocket, he can travel the solar system, filling up at near Earth comets. He even provides a map of them.

This puts him in contact with more interesting people, in particular the delightfully named Crazy Roger, a colonel in the US Air Force who pays Zuppero for an analysis based on his rocket idea.

Roger was head of Timber Wind, a special Strategic Defense Initiative project to build nuclear-powered rockets. The Federation of American Scientists uncovered Timber Wind in the early Nineties and the outcry over it – including a proposed test launch out of Vandenberg which, if it misfired, could potentially toss a nuclear reactor into New Zealand – eventually killed it.

It is retold in the chapter, “Crazy Roger’s Secret Nuclear Rocket”. In effect, this was a flying nuclear reactor, one that some assumed would be an orbiting radioactive garbage scow, raining down waste in places with unfortunate luck.

Even though space travel of the kind dreamed about decades ago had died, To Inhabit The Solar System is perfectly suited for movie-making, possibly as art house fare.

Replete with unusual characters and characterizations, good portions of it are laugh out loud funny, sometimes unintentionally so. One learns that being in space is a bummer, spaceships a bit like combined orbiting vomitoriums/outhouses.

“This is not sci-fi,” Zuppero tells readers right off.

Zuppero presents the reader with a collection of photos of ice moons he thinks humans could inhabit but believes “we are still the wrong species”: it’s too expensive and “we’re broke”. In the end the dream passes him by, but he clearly had a hell of a time chasing it.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantanamo counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.

“The new prison wing cost some $60 million to build … and is meant to be part of a new era of openness and transparency,” Bays said.

“But we were not shown the detainees. Human-rights lawyers say that, while the environment for the prisoners may be changing, their legal situation is not … not having been charged. Nor has any civilian lawyer ever been allowed inside.”

Bays said the extended prison could hold up to 1,000 detainees, but was at present holding around 700 inmates, including 30 foreign prisoners.

General Mark Martins, who runs detention operations at the airbase, said the US military was improving its treatment of detainees and had learnt many lessons since occupying the country in 2001.

“Detention, if not done properly, can actually harm the effort. We are a learning organisation … we believe transparency is certainly going to help the effort, and increase the credibility of the whole process,” Martins said.

However, Clara Gutteridge, an investigator of secret prisons and renditions from the human rights organisation, Reprieve, said Bagram is seen as “Guantanamo’s lesser-known evil twin”.

“All this talk about transparency, and the US government still won’t release a simple list of names of prisoners who are in Bagram,” she told Al Jazeera.

“None of them have had access to a lawyer … and that just seems very unfair.

“We at Reprieve see this as the next big fight after Guantanamo Bay.

“But one thing that the US government is saying is that Afghan prisoners in Afghanistan have less rights than any other prisoner which just seems absurd.”

The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

So even if Mr. Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan’s new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

Such an escalation in military spending would be a politically volatile issue for Mr. Obama at a time when the government budget deficit is soaring, the economy is weak and he is trying to pass a costly health care plan.

Senior members of the House Appropriations Committee have already expressed reservations about the potential long-term costs of expanding the war in Afghanistan. And Mr. Obama could find it difficult to win approval for the additional spending in Congress, where he would have to depend on Republicans to counter defections from liberal Democrats.

One senior administration official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the details of confidential deliberations, said these concerns had added to the president’s insistence at a White House meeting on Wednesday that each military option include the quickest possible exit strategy.

“The president focused a lot on ensuring that we were asking the difficult questions about getting to an end game here,” the official said. “He knows we cannot sustain this indefinitely.”

Sending fewer troops would lower the costs but would also place limitations on the buildup strategy. Sending 30,000 more troops, for example, would cost $25 billion to $30 billion a year while limiting how widely American forces could range. Deploying 20,000 troops would cost about $21 billion annually but would expand mainly the training of Afghans, the officials said.

The estimated $1 million a year it costs per soldier is higher than the $390,000 congressional researchers estimated in 2006.

Military analysts said the increase reflects a surge in costs for mine-resistant troop carriers and surveillance equipment that would apply to troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But some costs are unique to Afghanistan, where it can cost as much as $400 a gallon to deliver fuel to the troops through mountainous terrain.

The two men — Jerome O’Hara of Malverne, N.Y., and George Perez of East Brunswick, N.J. — were also named in a civil case filed on Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Securities regulators said that the two men created the computer software that generated the elaborate paper trail that Mr. Madoff used to conceal his fraud from investors and regulators for more than 15 years.

According to the complaints, both men grew uneasy about their role in the fraud three years ago and closed their own Madoff accounts in April 2006, withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

After a confrontation with Mr. Madoff in September 2006, they demanded pay raises and bonuses — what securities regulators called “hush money” — and agreed to remain silent about the fraud, according to the complaints.

Mr. O’Hara, 46, and Mr. Perez, 43, were each arrested at their homes on Friday and taken to federal court in Manhattan for arraignment. Both were released on a $1 million bail, to be secured by cash and property and co-signed by three financially responsible people within the next week. If convicted, they face up to 30 years in prison.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.